World Cup Park & Haneul Park

Character

World Cup Park transformed Seoul’s former Nanjido landfill into five connected parks, with Haneul Park occupying the highest mound above the Hangang and combining broad grassland, silver grass, observatories and the buried infrastructure that keeps the former dump stable

The five-part system is larger than Haneul alone: Pyeonghwa Park, Haneul Park, Noeul Park, Nanjicheon Park and Nanji Hangang Park divide the former landfill and surrounding river edge into different landscapes. Haneul is the clearest place to understand the original topography because its plateau is one of the landfill mountains themselves

That fact changes how the meadow reads. The hill was not formed by natural relief and then landscaped; Seoul’s waste created the elevation, and environmental engineering made it safe enough to become a park

The experience

The approach to Haneul is vertical. Visitors leave the lower World Cup Park area and climb toward a broad plateau roughly 100 metres above sea level, either on foot or using the park’s electric-cart service when operating

Once on top, the former landfill feels unexpectedly open. Silver grass and other managed grasslands spread across the plateau, wind turbines stand within the park, and viewpoints look toward the Hangang, Bukhansan and the dense city that once sent its waste here

A 2026 Korea Times report captures how complete the visual transformation has become. A younger nearby office worker described using Haneul for after-work runs without realizing she was exercising on a buried garbage mountain, while an older regular visitor remembered Nanjido as a dirty, foul-smelling dump. Both memories now occupy the same park

History

Nanjido became Seoul’s principal landfill in 1978. Over the next fifteen years, about 92 million tonnes of municipal waste accumulated there, creating two artificial mountains that rose to roughly 98 metres

The dump closed in 1993, but closure did not remove the waste. Stabilization work began in the 1990s: engineers installed barriers to control leachate, covered the waste with thick soil and rainwater-resistant layers, and built systems to collect landfill gas

That buried system remained active long after the park opened. A Seoul policy study records 106 gas-collection wells across Haneul and Noeul parks and notes that methane production and ground settlement continued years after stabilization. Captured landfill gas was reused as a district-heating fuel

World Cup Park opened in 2002 alongside Seoul’s hosting of the FIFA World Cup. The new park did not erase Nanjido’s history; it converted the former dump into public landscape while leaving its waste mass physically in place beneath the grass

Before you go

World Cup Park is too large to treat as a single casual circuit. Haneul is the most useful section for understanding the landfill transformation directly, while Pyeonghwa, Noeul, Nanjicheon and Nanji Hangang parks can extend the visit substantially